Justin Drake, a well-known researcher of the Ethereum Foundation, has just announced Beam Chain, a consensus layer that is expected to revolutionize the EVM world.
In the last few days, there were rumors about a supposed Ethereum 3.0 update coming, which should reduce block times to 1 second.
Today we discover how in reality a much more important change has been devised for the future of the blockchain. Let’s see all the details below.
Justin Drake announces Beam Chain at the Ethereum Devcon conference in Bangkok
Today during the Ethereum Devcon conference in Bangkok, the researcher Justin Drake revealed to the public the Beam Chain.
It is not a true blockchain where exchanges between users are processed, but rather a proposal to redesign the consensus layer of Ethereum.
Beam Chain resolves some headaches related to achieving consensus on the network (Beacon Chain) by simplifying some burdensome processes.
This solution incorporates all the latest and greatest ideas from the roadmap Ethereum through a unique package.
The main changes include a variation in the way staking is managed and a new approach for zero-knowledge cryptography.
Until a few days ago, there were rumors of an epochal change on the horizon for Ethereum, heralded as an update Ethereum 3.0.
The same Justin Drake had announced that at the Devcon in Bangkok he would make the announcement of his life. The ultimate goal of the researcher was to make the roadmap of the Beacon Chain extremely ambitious.
Drake presented his brilliant ideas to a crowded conference hall, with the audience supporting the researcher’s claims
The new Beam Chain will not involve any immediate changes to the Ethereum code, nor will it introduce a change to the project’s roadmap.
However, it proposes a major change in the way future updates of Ethereum are organized, consolidating them through a single initiative.
Today, Ethereum updates its main code approximately once a year. Drake proposes to continue making incremental updates to the chain periodically, but then to incorporate everything at once in a few years
Fast slots and instant purposes: the advantages of the new Beam Chain layer
As mentioned, the Beam Chain will work solely and exclusively on the Ethereum consensus layer, but it will introduce incredible advantages to the main L1 chain.
The technical innovations of the new solution by Justin Drake mainly concern faster slots and instant transaction finality.
This means that the new network will aim to increase the frequency with which blocks are added to the chain, highlighting what has already been announced by the rumors of ETH 3.0.
Among enthusiasts of the Ethereum world, there was talk of block times of less than 1 second, as well as SSF and a native zkEVM chain.
Currently, it takes about 15 minutes on Ethereum for a block to finalize.
This waiting creates opportunities for MEV extraction, but poses a series of limitations for the user experience, mainly for trades on DEX.
With Beam Chain, the time of 15 minutes could drop drastically, offering a wide range of advantages for both users and developers.
It is estimated that the new solution could sometimes establish the introduction of single-slot purposes, where the blocks with transaction data can be finalized immediately.
This makes Ethereum much more scalable than it is today, with the information on the chain becoming permanent immediately and impossible to modify.
In any case, there are some concerns regarding centralization with faster finalization times. Justin Drake and other Ethereum developers agree that greater computing power and sophisticated hardware will be needed.
It will be necessary, therefore, to balance the compromise between shortening the finalization times and the computing power.
What will happen to Ethereum’s layer-2?
With the introduction of the Beam Chain that reduces Ethereum’s block finality times, it is natural to wonder what the layer-2 networks will be used for in the future.
This kind of scaling solutions, which have popped up like mushrooms in 2024, are indeed used to increase the overall scalability of the L1.
By managing part of the computational work off-chain, layer-2s allow for an increase in the supply of blockspace, in the face of a fragmentation of liquidity.
With Beam Chain, some users in the crypto world believe that these will become obsolete in the future, as Ethereum will finally live on its own scalability.
Furthermore, the new proposal ensures that zero-knowledge proofs will be integrated into the Ethereum layer-1 main chain.
Justin Drake is much more reasonable about the value of Ethereum’s layer-2.
The researcher stated that Beam Chain concerns only the consensus chain and it is therefore wrong to think that it could affect the structure of layer-2.
Currently, several studies are underway on the execution state of Ethereum’s data layer, which massively involve these networks.
It is likely that Ethereum will achieve its own scalability while continuing to offer fertile ground for the growth of zk rollup chains.
Vitalik Buterin himself has repeatedly praised the nature of layer-2 solutions, considering them as a fundamental part of Ethereum’s roadmap.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2024/11/12/super-news-for-ethereum-researcher-justin-drake-introduces-the-consensus-layer-beam-chain/